


Hidden resonances

by Kes



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Don't Try This At Home, Electricity, F/M, Gen, Infinity Gems, Prophecy, Science, Visions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-10
Updated: 2015-05-14
Packaged: 2018-03-29 22:39:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3913282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kes/pseuds/Kes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the vision Wanda Maximoff gave him, Thor had more questions than answers, and so he sought truth with Jane, in a cave beneath the mountains.</p>
<p>[I didn't like that a) we didn't get to see what Thor went off and did, and b) that he didn't go to Jane about it. So here's me, redoing that.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For the first bit of what Wanda shows him, see my [Strings](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3824563).

_Maximoff is good,_ Thor thinks, teeth clenched, as Heimdall lets him go and he stares downwards through the floor of Valhalla into the burned out husk of Yggdrasill. This is an impressive construction. It is a construction, something she drew out of his own mind, made up of his greatest fears. It is not real. The people whirl around him like panic, familiar face after beloved face, and he will not scream, or lash out – she has constructed this, brought his fears to the surface. All he has to do is wait for his mind to turn itself outwards again and not harm anyone in the outer world before it does. For that, he must be calm.

Hopefully an outward appearance of calm will do.

To take his mind from the dead – _do not dance with them do not fight with them do not eat their food or take their drink_ – he pushes his way to the wall and stares at it, trying to remember all he knows about manipulation of the mind. This must work on the same principle as the Allspeak, but inverted; instead of projecting her meaning to him, she has drawn it out of his own mind and turned his perception inwards.

If that is so, then there may be things to be found here. She has to have ordered it around his mind as it was in the moment she found it; beyond this vision are things he knows and the connections to things he has forgotten he knows. _What might Ultron do with the sceptre?_ he thinks, uses all his skill with the magic of the Allspeak to force Maximoff’s vision to change – if she is still here, he will fail, but he thinks she has left him to his own devices, knowing he will be away from the world long enough. Perhaps if he succeeds here his absence outside will not be for nothing.

Slowly, slowly, the dead draw back. It was too much to hope that they would leave. But the hall is changing shape, no longer the arching, archaic halls of Valhalla, but a dizzying array of pathways out. All of them are angular, and he recognises the Vault of Valaskjalf, multiplied into a kaleidoscope of stars, all leading outwards from a pedestal with the sceptre on it. The dead cluster around, obscuring the way.

He picks it up and chooses the one that lies straight in front of him. The possibilities shift and warp as he moves, but he keeps going. The sceptre leads to the Tesseract, to New York and Loki, to Erik with his eyes and mind shatter-glass blue. The Tesseract leads to the Infinity Gauntlet replica in the Vault – why? Of course it does, but why now, why when he is focussing on the sceptre?

Around him there are less possibilities, and the dead are drawing back. There’s something hard pressed up against his head as he stares at the blue gem in the sceptre. He does not have much time. Tentatively he touches his mind’s projection of the gem, and it – responds.

Before he can take a step further, he wakes, lying crumpled on the deserted warehouse floor with his head on an open toolbox. There is no lightning damage here – he has not hurt anyone – but no signs of anyone else, either, and his comms have burned out.

Thor spends the flight to Clint’s ‘safehouse’ taking his mind from Heimdall’s words attempting to remember everything he knows about the Gauntlet, Infinity Stones, Tesseract and mind magic. It isn’t enough, at least that which is within his conscious mind, and he still does not know whether the gem’s response came from his own knowledge or Wanda Maximoff’s. Behind him Natasha and Stark monitor the media coverage of the disaster, the only thing they can now do.

No-one speaks unless they have to; brief explanations of where they’re going, occasional updates on the worst and best of the coverage, once or twice a word to Bruce. He isn’t talking, but his hurt is projecting out into the room strong enough that Thor can sense it like language. That brings his mind back to the problem at hand.

At Clint’s house, he considers borrowing a computer or a phone and messaging Jane, but Ultron is in the internet; he will have to go himself if he does not wish to endanger Clint’s family. Before he does, he draws out as much as he can remember without consulting Tony, and catches Steve looking at him.

“I didn’t know you drew.”

“I do not, normally – I am trying to record this before I forget.” The course he must take is clear before him, but he still shies from it. Maybe Jane will be able to work her magic on this tiny amount of data. Maybe. Maybe he will not have to risk the Waters.

Steve grimaces and leans on the fridge. Unlike Thor, he’s taken off his suit’s outer layers and now wears what must be the largest jacket Clint owns over his undershirt. It still barely reaches his wrists. “Maximoff was playing with our minds, bringing up our worst fears to tear us apart. Maybe it’s best not dwelled on.”

“She brought our fears up, but she also brought up other things that are not available to the everyday mind, and I was able to turn the vision to exploring the buried parts of my memory.” It had not saved him from the eyes of the dead. “The sceptre is not what it seems, and I was a fool not to look closer at it. What do you know of it?”

“Alien artefacts aren’t my speciality,” he says, but takes the paper and begins to sketch with a lot more skill than Thor. “A small glowing blue gem inside an Asgardian-looking staff. I took it for something like a Hydra fuel cell from the war at first, but obviously it’s not. Touching it to the chest puts people under mind control, which turns their eyes blue. Loki brought it, he could make it blast energy or use it like a polearm. Strucker was using it for human experimentation, which produced the twins, and Tony thought it could be the key to making his AI come to life.”

The eyes. The eyes are the key – it is so familiar – but no two Infinity Stones are the same colour. That is the stumbling block – Steve is staring at the paper as though he could burn it with his eyes. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, I just – Hydra’s got a history of playing with people’s minds, long before they could’ve got this. If Strucker was using this on those kids, I bet he’d been using other things.”

There’s something he isn’t saying that’s nearly as loud as what he is. Thor looks at him for a moment and decides there is no time. “I have to go,” he says instead.

“Where?”

“I am going to ask Jane – she may understand more. This is not truly her field, but she made a brief but intensive study of… cosmic artefacts, and has since incorporated Erik’s research into her own.” The Waters… unless he must go, he will not raise it. Thinking of speaking it aloud brings it that much closer, and he takes a long, slow breath.

“I’ll talk to Bruce and Tony, get them to contact Maria from a payphone or something so that she can forward Jane as much of their research as is on paper.” Steve dips his head, the ghost of a grin on his face that soon fades to wistfulness. “See, there’s something to not going digital. You’re less vulnerable to killer robots.”

“Thank you,” he says, and scribbles down Jane’s current contact details. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know yet.” Steve looks down again, his shoulders slumped. “Something, I guess. I feel like we should be doing something right now, but the team’s nowhere near fighting state. World’s got an uncanny knack for looking at you when you think you’ve done all right and saying, nope, your world needs to get more fucked.”

Leadership is always hard, but harder when the times are, and Thor claps him on the shoulder. Sometimes he forgets how young Steve is. With this group he is never sure whose age it is he is forgetting or whether there is anything of significance to forget. “I will return. We are not beaten yet, Steve, and you have not failed.”

“Sometimes that’s kinda hard to believe.”

“I know.”


	2. Chapter 2

Jane has not been following the news. This, in its way, is reassuring; the news is not so bad as to have intruded upon her focus. He arrives at the camp in Norway dry, but cold and salt-soaked – crossing the Atlantic by hammer, even for him, is no joke – and explains the situation to Jane in her room in the living hut as he washes and changes. “Ultron’s a created being,” she says, her eyes fixated at some point behind his chest. “They came into being when Tony Stark mixed his own AI protocols with some structure inside the gem and expected it to behave like he wanted it to, right?”

“Yes. My vision suggested it relates to the Infinity Stones, which do have some characteristics of a mind, but the gem isn’t any of them. I remember being taught the list of them.”

“You were taught the list of them, but we already know the list was wrong in one way – the Aether still exists.” She says it slowly, as though something is coming together in her mind, and he doesn’t rush it. “You were taught them as a list, one, two, three – with recognisable shapes and colours. But they can be contained – Erik made a containment case for the Tesseract, and then you brought the design for that tube, then there was that stone enclosure for the Aether. They can look like other things.”

A smile crosses his face; he was right to come, for all it raises spectres he has tried to lay to rest. “Yes – and this one came with Loki, who, who did not like to tell things he need not –”

“And who used it to possess people – which must make it what, the yellow one? That messes with the mind. But it put them in contact with both the Tesseract’s centre and the will of Loki – ”

“The Mind Gem. Hidden underneath something that attuned it to the Tesseract and Loki –”

“You might be able to do that, I think – the Tesseract itself is a luminary quartz housing around the true heart of the Stone, luminary quartz might work as your basis – I know far too little about that –”

“Yes, I suppose – if you engraved a particular magic channelling design on it, you could preserve the original powers while attuning it differently. He might have been able to do it; our studies were different.” He pulls on a hoody and sits down on the bed, craning to look at what she is tapping in to the computer; some of it he understands. The last year has been spent learning how to fit around each other, which in practice meant Thor learning astrophysics and attempting to integrate Asgardian learning with Earth’s alongside the normal issues like bed sharing, wardrobe space and shower time and the less fun ones like dealing with grief and the strains the Aether put on Jane’s body.

At the moment she is flicking through Erik’s data and some stuff Darcy pulled out of the Triskelion leak. “But it came over as weaker – it would do, if it’s being channelled into doing something it wouldn’t normally do. If Ultron wants to use it to its full potential, they need to get it out of the blue sheath and – I don’t know what then. It depends on what they want to do.”

“That’s the problem,” he agrees, his gut twisting, and he does not look away from her. “Malekith absorbed the Aether into himself.”

“That’s possible, but they’ll struggle – they don’t interface with the human mind very well, and that’s what Tony Stark was basing his AI protocols off. But I don’t mean that, I mean, what they want to use it for. They might want to, I don’t know, enslave every mind on Earth, or they might want to transcend it… The vibranium suggests they’re building something, but we don’t know what.” Her fingers tap lightly on the desk, a frown creasing her brows.

Silence falls between them, a silence that normally neither would fear. The Mind Gem had been lost to Asgardian eyes centuries ago, last seen in a war at the other end of space; the Stones attract chaos wherever they go. Three have now been found on Earth, or brought here, the greatest concentration since the scattering of the Gauntlet. His thoughts march on, unstoppable, until the silence breaks.

“This is bigger than Ultron,” Jane says, eventually.

“It is.” And yet Loki is dead. That trail thereafter is at a dead end. “There may be a way.”

“The Waters of Sight,” she breathes, and he can’t tell whether it’s fear or excitement on her face.

Jane’s research takes her to many places in search of the hidden resonances of Yggdrasill, and one of them had been to a cave deep below the Norwegian mountains where the passages between the worlds had become flooded. Legend told of it, a spring from which the mind could glean truths from the opened universe if it could survive, and Darcy thought it was probably connected to the Norn legends. Thor, who knew how secretive and knowledgeable the true Norns of Nornheim could be, had suspected that another part of the flooded tunnels opened there.

As of yet, they had not studied it extensively; a few samples, a preliminary theoretical exploration, but that was all. The legends were adamant about the fate of those who used the Waters as they were meant to be used, and Jane’s funding was for other things – but they would go back. Sooner rather than later.

“Wait, no, that’s a terrible idea, you are not dying or fake dying on me again.”

“I must try.” He lays a hand on her arm, gently, and she covers it with one of her own. Both of them remember the earlier times. “I think I can control it; Wanda Maximoff set a good example. I swear to you, I do not mean to die on you again, but I have a duty to this world and all others.”

With a slight huff, she taps his knuckles. “Well, I’m coming with you. If it all goes horribly wrong someone has to, has to pick up the pieces.”

It isn’t a surprise. Still, the admiration twists in his throat like fear. “Thank you. Someone must, and I am glad it will be you.”

She smiles, a smile born more of determination than happiness, and more of anticipation than either. “I’ve got a few ideas about safety measures, they’re pretty dangerous but they might work – I considered going myself –”

“So it is all right for you, but not me?”

A flush crosses her cheeks. “I’m a scientist, Thor.”

The first time they met, she had tried to drive into the Bifrost. The second, she had walked through a portal to elsewhere. Of course she has considered it. He shakes his head. “I insist on being the one to risk it first.” If nothing else, he is more likely to survive, and less likely to be hurt by either the experience or the safety measures.


	3. Chapter 3

The cave is not a grand place. They worm their way through three tiny holes barely large enough to fit him, leaving Darcy outside with a secure line to Jane’s everything in case something goes wrong, and come out into a cramped space lit by a single shaft of light from above and the unearthly lights from the water. Blue and gold and rainbow colours, it makes the harsh lines of fallen rock around it seem like a swallowing mouth. Hurriedly Jane cracks a glow stick and sets her station up while Thor steels himself to strip off.

What he will find when he jumps, he does not know. Hopefully he will be able to steer it as he did Wanda Maximoff’s vision, only this time with the branches of Yggdrasill there for the exploration rather than just those of his own mind. The stories say it manifests as a form of possession, though, which is the ominous part; possession by the streams of the universe can be no easy matter, even for an Asgardian.

“Ready?” he asks her, loth to wait any longer.

“Yeah.”

The air is freezing as he takes his clothes off and lays them at the side. He shivers as he sits next to the pool and helps Jane rig him up; her safety measures consist of a modified climbing harness and several electrodes taped to him with waterproof tape. Darcy had, after yelling at both of them for considering it, provided a thorough run-down of the risks outlined in the legends. The harness will hopefully force the possessing force to allow his body to return out of the water, the electrodes will serve as a call to his mind to reassert itself. It is not safe at all and in that, they are relying on his centuries of practice with lightning to aid him; a human could easily be killed by the water and the current, but he has been using enormous amounts of electrical power all his life. Still, it is a slim thread for a life to hang by, and his heart pounds as Jane works. “Be careful,” she says in his ear, one hand cupping his face.

He tilts his head to face her. “I give you my word, I will. Will you?”

“Promise.” In a way, her job is harder. Her fingers pull his face closer and she kisses him.

The water is colder than the air. It feels electric, fizzing with magic, buoyant in a way that is almost reminiscent of the Bifrost lifting him off his feet. Nothing happens. “So what now?” he asks the water.

“I don’t know, try diving?”

Carefully he checks the harness and the tape and ducks below the surface. There isn’t space for a true dive in the tiny chimney, but he does manage to get deeper. The lights stretch on into the distance, charged luminary quartz as bright as it was in the passage to Svartalfheim. That makes him think of Loki. Maybe there had been a chance, if only death had not come so soon. The lights are dancing like the eyes of the dead, and their hands claw at him, down and down and down – he is struggling, scrabbling, but there is nothing to get hold of, no air, no harness, no answer, and a voice like the rushing of the water seizes his mind and says, “Leave the vessel to me, son of Asgard.”

Jane is at the surface. Jane will ask the right questions and bring him back. Thor stops struggling.

Around him the dancing lights resolve themselves into Yggdrasill, and he recognises the great library of Gladsheim; he perceives from within the mirror tree of stars. He knows then that he is still within his own mind, though the mind is adrift from the body. Without it, fear is a distant, unreal thing. _Jane will bring me back,_ he thinks to himself, and the room ripples around him. He steps out of the tree and into an Asgard on fire. Within, Heimdall awaits him, his feet blackening.

“Is this real?”

“You have passed through the Water of Sights. There is truth here for you, though it may not be real.”

“Will you guide me?” Even his own mind-shade of Heimdall would be a worthy guide.

He gives a low chuckle. “This is your road to walk, your vision to have. You will see perhaps more than I do, if you can find the way and distinguish well what is real, and what is merely true.”

-

Jane bites her lip as Thor submerges himself. The light from the glowsticks make it seem as though he has vanished into a black hole, and the bright glow of her screen doesn’t help. The rope on the harness runs out and out and out, and with every coil her stomach twists more violently – the only thing in it is coffee – but eventually, it stops. All is silence. “Come up and talk to me, I summon you!” she calls. This is guesswork pure and simple, with far too little data to rely on. “Come here!”

Something sploshes in the dark void in front of her, and a sleek head rises. It is Thor, and yet not Thor; his eyes glow, gold like Heimdall’s beneath a film of rainbow light, and he moves slower and less deliberately. When the entity speaks, it sounds like rushing water, and it comes from within Thor’s body as though he is hollow. “Speak, little one.”

The priority is the information about the Stones, about Ultron – but she itches to know about this entity. Thor’s life is heavy in her steady hands, though, so she asks it, “What is Ultron doing with the Mind Gem now?”

“The small electrical creature? Hmm. Oh, it is careful… but it cannot hide, no, not from me. It is in a building on a lake like glass on the other side of this realm with three humans, and one of them near as empty as this vessel. There are lights and a coccoon of electricity, and in a tomb a body grows with the Gem at its head.”

“Why?”

“Who can see into the minds of electric humans?”

“Well, I hoped you could.” What question is next? Her hands are sweaty, leaving streaks across the screen. That was more information than she hoped for; the entity is surprisingly co-operative.

“The lines of the future, little one, are never so clear as the past and the present. I can tell you that it is scared, and has the tools to fight upwards while defending against what lies below – but the Gem warps all around it, time and space.”

That isn’t truly surprising; she suspects all the Stones are reality-warping devices, even when not ‘in use.’ The entity is staring at her with an almost Thor-like intensity. Where might he be now? What is he experiencing? “Where was it before it came to Earth?” ‘Where did it come from,’ had been too broad, even though the answer would be fascinating.

“I have been so long alone, and now you come, with a strong vessel for me to speak through and questions that send me to worlds I can scarce reach.” The entity smiles at her, leans on the rocks; it has not tried to remove the harness. “It is an interesting question. There is a person, armoured, on a throne of rock suspended in space; and it is surrounded by a haze of uncertainty; it and the Stones are linked, and there is a strange artefact held by it that clouds my knowledge. But I see that it sent the stone, with a little horned person in green.”

Jane’s breath heaves inwards. _Will we ever escape his shadow?_ she thinks.

-

Thor knows that this detachment will only last as long as his own disembodiment, though it is fortunate now. He has walked through the burning halls of Gladsheim, burning in all the colours of the rainbow, and now he faces the throne. Upon it sits his brother; he is upright, stiff-backed, his eyes staring blankly into the flames. Thor walks closer. Even if this shade of Loki is only the bundle of his own memories, it might know things he has forgotten. “Loki.”

Abruptly his gaze snaps into focus on him, and Thor realises that instead of the sceptre, he holds Gungnir across his lap. It is broken. “Have you come to gloat?”

“No – brother, I would talk to you.” It sounds so like him, and yet it cannot be.

Loki laughs, hard and bitter. “Then talk.”

“What has happened?” The question is addressed not just at the shade of his brother but also through it to his own mind; at the last, they had looked gently on each other, and yet here there is no sign of it.

“Only the proof that both of us are fools, like the Allfather before us. Come closer.”

If he steps forward, he will be on the stairs, and in lunging reach. Thor moves forward seemingly without movement, through the last flicker of flames, and looks up at Loki on his throne. Behind him stands another figure, shadowy and outlined by the absence of fire, huge and heavily armoured. “Who is he?”

“The one who found me second,” Loki says, and Thor realises that the bitterness is not aimed at him.

Propelling himself forwards, he tries to get closer to the shadowy figure for a better view – surely it is not his father, at least that ‘second’ indicates that – but by the time he reaches it it is gone. “What is he doing?”

“See.” Despite being disembodied, Thor feels Loki’s touch as he guides him to look out into the void ahead from the top of the throne. The hall he came through is gone, and instead the stars stretch out below him. Among them are nestled the realms as they slowly depart from their recent convergence. “I cannot tell you, but perhaps you can remember what I did not tell you, and see beyond this place.”

At first, all seems well – but then he realises that the fire is not gone. It has separated, fires of different colours, streaking among the stars towards Midgard. Five bright spots, in a ragged ring , and the alignment of the realms makes them a halo around the whole line – but there is one missing and a yellow glow on Earth. “I must see it,” he says to Loki, apologetically. “Thank you.”

“I will remain here while I may.”

Thor launches himself forward, and the stars pass by like meteors.


	4. Chapter 4

The entity does not seem to breathe, Jane notices as it contemplates her question about the armoured person in the stars. “I can tell little of it,” it says eventually. “It takes care to stay away from lines of clear sight, so I look at it in reflection and inference. Little is closed to me, but much is indistinct. One reflection is interesting; a green person came from it and vanished beneath a purple glow, running from it, and reappeared on the other side.”

“Is the armoured person trying to get all the Stones, then?”

“I cannot tell. It is associated with the Stones. Perhaps it seeks them; perhaps it made them; perhaps it guards them; perhaps it dispenses them.”

She glances down at her tablet. The recording software is running and reacting to the voice, although the speech-to-text has thrown up a garbled mess. Hopefully she will not have to rely on memory alone. “Can you tell me more about Ultron and the body, then?”

“I could tell you many things, Jane Foster; things you have lain awake wondering of, things you dreamed of and things you could not.” What the entity does then cannot be described as smiling; on Thor’s face, it is grotesque. Jane thinks of him and shakes her head.

“No, thanks – what I asked, please.”

If it had breathed, it would have huffed then. “Very well. The metal person and the empty one in the blue robe are bustling around it, and the metal one seeks to connect. They have outposts in a great city, a honeycomb of tunnels lined with destruction, south of here; the home of the red person and the fast one. That is in the present. In the past, neither existed. In the future, there is red anger, or there is destruction, or there is lightning, or there is a transfer.”

“Tell me about the futures that don’t end with Ultron destroying the world.”

“After all I have explained, still you think it is so easy, so simple; what does destroying the world mean? That is the least of the flaws in that question – but I could teach you, if you wished it. In many parts of the future, there is only a metal person obscured by the Gem. In many others, there are two, and only one of them by the Gem. That one lies behind lightning and red magic and the hope of warriors.”

Jane goes through the conversation in her head, heart racing. All the questions on the list have been asked, and anything she forgets to ask must go unasked. “What are you?” she says eventually. Learning what this entity is might allow a greater understanding of what it has said, and less lost if there are questions she has not asked.

-

Thor zooms towards Earth as the Infinity Stones converge upon it, and slowly he realises that it is being held. A great metal gauntlet cups it in its hand, and he recognises it from the replica in his father’s vault. Like some of the Stones themselves, it was said to have been destroyed; he should not be surprised that it is not.

From the Earth, he can see that the gems are flying inwards towards their rightful place in it – all except the yellow one, the Mind Gem. That one stands beside him, set in the forehead of a metal person; they are tall, red-skinned, androgynous, and they show no sign of obeying the call as the others do. “Who are you?” Thor asks. Last seen, the Mind Gem was alone, unembodied.

“I do not know yet; I am not born. What I become depends on many hands, yours among them.”

Something about the way they speak seems familiar, and Thor smiles at them. But the light around them is sickly with colour, and he turns to look back up towards Asgard.

What he sees there sends a shock through him. Beyond the fire is the throne, where Loki stands looking back at him – and behind Loki there is the shadow of a wolf, its jaws opening wide.

Thor’s disembodied self turns cold, clutches inwards, and pain rips into his body from all sides at once.

-

It looks at her intently. “A worthy question for one such as you, though one that would take a lifetime to answer. That which speaks is an interface with an existence, that which this vessel is submerged in. I am and yet am not; I know and yet do not; I conceive and yet do not. This vessel you have given me is strong, and so I am, and could continue to be.”

“Well, you can’t have him.” Jane likes riddles only when they are problems, not designed to be as cryptic and obscure as possible.

“Surely we can come to some form of agreement. You are a person of great reach, star-hearted; there is much you can have of me and much I will willingly give.”

Anger blasts up inside her ribcage and she realises that her hands are stiff with it as she answers. “I will not let you take him. If you think you can just – buy Thor’s body off me for data –” There are no more worthwhile questions to ask, not now the entity’s purpose lies bare. For all she knows, it was only going along with her to give her some sort of sick ‘free trial,’ in the hope of a trade, and now that is dashed –

It uses Thor’s body to try to leap upwards, the hollow water-sound raised to the thunder of a waterfall. Jane thrusts the tablet behind her and reaches for the battery. Water splashes across the cave. She uses her body as a shield as she flicks the switch.

The first shock of the electricity jerks the entity backwards and away from her, back towards the water. At first it stays in Thor’s body, invisible, and Jane bites her lip hard enough to draw blood – the signal that he is returned is lightning. If he cannot translate it into lightning then he is not there. His body spasms around, muscles clenching as though to tear itself apart, and the entity is howling like the wildest seas – the battery is not powerful enough for this, surely, this must be him, and what if he cannot control it and it stops his heart?

Something bright arcs out from his chest, and then his eyes. His body falls still while lightning dances around him. Slowly, he turns his head. His mouth is bloody, his eyes a scorching blue-white, and he smiles. Jane flicks the switch.

At first, the lightning does not subside. Thor looks around from within it – even from here she can see he is shaking, and her throat tightens. “Ground it!” she calls out, her voice a ragged squeak. Why hasn’t it grounded itself?

Slowly he pulls himself up, and she thinks he is shaking his head. He looks upwards and the lightning gathers on his chest, where the roundels are on his armour. The very air crackles now, and she can feel her hair frizzing up. Thor lets out a roar, barely audible beneath the thunder, and arcs his body backwards, and the lightning blasts upwards, on and on and on.

It is gone. As Jane blinks the dazzle out of her eyes, she realises that he is staggering towards the water again – “Careful!” She isn’t close enough to grab him so she reaches out and tugs on the rope attached to the harness as he staggers, and the pull is enough that when he falls it is safely onto the rock. Carefully she picks her way across to join him. “Thor?”

“Jane,” he says, and pushes himself up so that she can hug him.

It is him. There had been that nagging terror that the entity had simply learned from him how to use the lightning, and the relief makes her arms feel limp. “You’re back. You’re safe,” she says, pushing his wet hair back off his face. He trembles to the touch. “We did it, it’s okay, you did it. You’re all right.”

“Jane – are you all right? I have seen horrors, I have been – it is all coming on me at once, everything I saw.” His voice breaks on the last note and he reaches around her to pull her closer. “You did it. You brought me back.”

“Yeah, you’re back. I’m fine.” Does he know that the entity tried to keep him? If not, it can wait. Talking through it all can wait, though she hopes Darcy received the recordings in real time, in case the lightning in the air frazzled her own electronics. The cold air bites through her wet clothes where he is holding her – he must be even colder, wearing none. “I’m going to start taking the electrodes off, all right?”

By now Thor’s head is practically buried in her shoulder, and he gently buts it against her chin. “They worked well,” he says, still sounding shaken but more coherent. “Did you get answers?”

“I did.” And without losing what the entity hoped to gain. Jane nuzzles her face against his as her hands pull off the tape, feeling him stiffen each time she peels some off. A price has been paid for this, and she won’t know how high until they talk it through; he is clinging to her like an anchor. Whatever he experienced down there was bad – and her answers will not make it better. Still, there is a way forward. Where there are answers, there are solutions.


End file.
